What makes a great leader?
At some point in my Christian life, I came to a conclusion. I wanted to be more than morally good. I wanted to make a difference in the world for His kingdom. I decided I needed to know what a leader is and what a leader does. Jesus was a leader… right? And so my questions began:
What makes a leader a good leader? What abilities or skills do leader hone in order to inspire, direct, recruit, guide, bless, enrich, and engender other people? How do leaders gain support, make connections, find opportunities, influence people. How in the world do people get their way without making everyone their enemy?
After much reading and pondering, I find that there is an elusive element that I cannot recall being addressed. It is simply the fact that people follow a leader. Leaders just are, and leaders are followed. This is a depressing fact for someone always looking for a box or a mold to fit into. There isn’t a mold you can conform to where by copying x,y,z into you life (or copy you life after x,y,z) you will become a leader. Some of the goofiest, nerdiest people I know, (that do NOT fit into the leadership box I’ve read so much about) have loyal followers.
The coup de grace was when the elusive quality of leadership just showed up at an after church lunch at MY house. A particular person walks into the room and suddenly, the whole affair organized itself and an air of purpose infused the casual time. Things didn’t become rigid or directed, but “hanging out” wasn’t just unfettered spontaneity anymore. That’s when I realized that I was doomed. Yes, DOOMED, because I realized that everything I was trying to glean and understand from books was not leading to understanding. The dissected and analyzed pieces of the idea do not get me to the reality of the idea… just more knowledge about the measurable aspects of an idea. For example, we know of gravity and the phenomena of falling objects. We’ve come up with all kinds of equations and experiments that prove gravity is a constant. But do we know how gravity works? We have theories (granted), but we don’t have the instrumentation to examine the mechanism of gravity… only the effects of gravity.
The bottom line is you are a leader if people follow you. If people organize around you, you are a leader. I’ve seen people stylize themselves as a leader and do their best to be genuine in there “leading”. However, no one ever asked them to pray for their gathering, or for their opinion, or for their counsel. Someone else was leading.